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Fresh from a 20-day voyage to a Texas-size vortex of plastic trash called the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, a team of La Jolla researchers on Thursday showed samples of what they found floating some 1,000 miles off San Diego's coast.

Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography used nets to collect marine debris for a study to highlight how the trash is damaging an ecosystem that few people ever see and few marine biologists have assessed. The refuse – discarded by beachgoers and ships – eventually converges in an area known as the North Pacific gyre, where trade winds can trap it for years.

Scripps and the nonprofit venture Project Kaisei in San Francisco each sent a ship to the site. Their roughly $850,000 project is the most comprehensive effort to date for analyzing the plastic trash.

On Thursday, Scripps director Tony Haymet said there has been enormous public interest in the trip. As a result, the institute – part of the University of California San Diego – will continue to examine the garbage patch while trying to form an alliance with other groups for a voyage to the South Pacific gyre.

That expedition could take place late next year or in 2011.

“We are afraid of what we're going to find in the South Pacific, but it's time to go,” Haymet said during a news conference at Scripps.

There are five major ocean gyres. The plastic and other debris in them harms or kills marine life, thus disrupting the food chain and overall ecosystem.

Plastic pollution of the ocean is a problem that Scripps might be able to help solve rather than study, Haymet said. Some researchers are trying to see whether it's feasible to recover the plastic and turn it into fuel. They also want to increase public awareness about the importance of not discarding plastic at beaches or into waterways.

It will take weeks for the Scripps team and its Northern California colleagues to draw scientific conclusions about what they found at the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

“Though we'd been pulling up plastic in our nets for days, seeing it freely floating about was shocking,” said Miriam Goldstein in a blog post from aboard the research vessel New Horizon. “The magnitude of the problem suddenly came crashing down on me.”